Evernote Essentials Teaches You Evernote Fast

Evernote is an incredibly robust note collecting app that is available on a variety of platforms. I love Evernote and have written many articles about it. The app is powerful and has so many different features that it's easy for a new user to be overwhelmed. So how are you going to learn how to use Evernote quickly? Evernote Essentials by Brett Kelly will quickly teach you the features of Evernote in just a couple of hours of reading. Read on for my review of Evernote Essentials complete with book excerpts.

Learning Evernote

There are lots of blogs and ebooks that discuss Evernote and its features. Collectively, one can glean quite a bit of knowledge from these resources. But time is money and spending hours reviewing website after website is counterproductive. You need to use a single resource that has everything you'll need to become an Evernote power-user in one convenient location.

Enter Evernote Essentials. Evernote Essentials is the unofficial manual for Evernote with the vast majority of the application's functions documented in the tome. The author, Brett Kelly, does a great job of keeping the book updated as new features are added to Evernote. And Kelly, who is also an Evernote employee, admits to being an “Evernote Nerd.”

Kelly explores Evernote in a casual, conversational tone, that is easy to follow and to understand. Some of his commentary can be a little over-the-top, but he is still successful at driving the point home.

A Look at Evernote Essentials

The book begins by taking a detailed look at the notes structure of Evernote and how the views can differ slightly between the Windows and Apple operating systems. He discusses the various types of notes and delves into formatting and more advanced options.

One of the great things about Evernote Essentials is that Kelly offers his own personal tips and tricks for getting more out of the software. For instance, he demonstrates his note tagging strategy of “Starting Generally, and Ending Specifically.”

The book progresses into a discussions about notebooks, syncing, and doing a high level search. It also goes deeper into the differences with the app as it appears on the Windows and Apple operating systems as well as the differences between the two versions. Yes, it is the same program, but there are some subtle differences in appearance and behavior on the different platforms.

Once Kelly has completed his overview of the two app versions, he goes into a deeper discussion about Evernote power-user strategies, including advanced searching and tagging techniques. While some of the terms that he uses sound technical, the author does a great job of making them easy to understand.

What I particularly like about Evernote Essentials is the detail given to the search capabilities of the app. That's where the power of Evernote lies, in its search functions.

Kelly explains search operators:

Evernote search operators share common form and logic. If you want to find all of the notes that have a certain attribute, you’d search with “operator:”. For all notes that don’t have that attribute, prepend your statement with a minus: “-operator:”. Pretty simple, right? Let’s take a look at each of the available operators.

Pretty straightforward. Here's an operator usage example he provides:

tag — Obviously, this operator lets you filter notes that have (or don’t have) a specific tag. For example:

tag:waffles

This will match all of the notes in the active notebook (or all notebooks, if that’s selected) that are tagged with “waffles.”

The book briefly discusses some of the other built-in functions of Evernote including note and notebook sharing, GPS, and how it interfaces with other Evernote apps (Evernote Hello, Evernote Food, Penultimate, and Skitch). Kelly also talks about the Evernote Trunk for finding other apps and utilities that work in tandem with Evernote.

Evernote Essentials also provides a lot of suggested uses for Evernote including a couple of full “Use Cases.” I also have a modest list of Evernote uses you can peruse at your leisure.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned above, Evernote is a really robust program with lots of features and functions. Evernote Essentials is a fantastic book for quickly learning how to use the program.

I appreciate that Kelly doesn't get too technical in the discussion and is very casual in his presentation. If you want to learn the basics and then move on to more advanced techniques, Evernote Essentials is going to be an awesome resource for you to add to your library.

As of this writing, Evernote Essentials is available for the rockbottom price of only $29. One of the awesome incentives Kelly offers purchasers of Evernote Essentials is a free update when new editions of the book come out. Yes, you read that correctly. He offers free updates for life. With Evernote constantly adding new features, this is a great benefit to have.

And if you're not completely sold, he also offers a 30 day money back guarantee. That's right, try the book out and if you're not an Evernote expert or “Ninja” once you're done reading it, you can get your money back, no questions asked.

Disclosure of Material Connection

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Please be advised that I only recommend products or services that I have used or tried personally and believe will add value to my readers' lives. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”